Two Jakes

I went to Beirut in June of 2010 because my father was dying.-- Claire Messud

There is a scene toward the climax in Chinatown, brilliantly staged by Polanski. Mrs. Mulwray drives Jake to the sanitarium which Noah Cross utilizes for his cover up, and in the foreground we see a resident of the sanitarium sexually harass a nurse who looks like a horse's scrotum, and the nurse, care worn and world weary, bids the octogenarian to have a seat and finish his meal. It is nearly a Shakespearean moment. The Nicholson Dunaway Huston trifecta bisected by the lewd romper room antics, antics which offer cues about Roman fucking nubile adolescents in puberty, and yet, Polanski's entitlement with his alleged victim is a footnote, an inconvenience, even as he might have been my psychotic stepfather, in my poem "Broken China" I am crying out daddy daddy help me, wishing my father had killed my mother's second husband, fearful of the reverse but unsure. Stuart was brutal, but my father had a more calculated Roman menace. Should this woman be a footnote due to Polanski's genius? That woman in India, I have to close my mind to her trauma. Many of us would; many of us do. What that must have felt like, gang raped and then internal hemorrhaging, an iron rod to violate her. Violate is too nuanced for her agony. Her uterus was likely perforated. A footnote.

My father will never know how much hatred I feel that I failed him, that the IRS my mother and his son destroyed the life he deserved. He never talks to me but now that his third wife is dying, now he speaks. He made me almost wealthy in an invalid's barren and bleak institutional environment and this is my evil, created my evil, that human life is so expendable. The veterinarian whom Moyers filmed openly discussed euthanizing  himself with horse tranquilizer during the brief time he could operate a power chair. In the last segment, he pleaded with his wife to let him go, recumbent, shrunken, clothed in a polo shirt. We do not realize the profound impact of the photographic medium, the saturation of prognosis, treatment, the mechanized technology with which we contain disease. The majority of my life was spent in a hospital, and then I force myself to watch it in a teleplay funded by Congress to educate the American public on the brutality of modern medicine.